Electronics funds transfer transactions may be used to move money from one account to another over arbitrary distances. Electronic funds transfers are gaining popularity among consumers for sending or receiving money to or from family or friends. However, electronic funds transfers are undesirable for some users because of long delays arising from laws or regulations intended to protect financial institutions. For example, an originator of electronic funds transfers processed through the United States Federal Reserve as Automated Clearing House (ACH) operator normally is required to wait four (4) business days for a paying bank to provide a negative report on a transaction, or for the transaction to clear otherwise, before completing a transfer on the fifth business day after initiation. The waiting period is intended, in part, to provide sufficient time for a payer's financial institution to determine whether the payer's account holds sufficient funds to fund the transfer or to allow the ACH network to determine if funds are collectible from the payer. In many cases, the regulatory waiting period is far longer than actually necessary to process transactions given the computing capabilities of modern financial institutions. Consequently, consumers may become impatient with the required time and perceive the transaction originator to be undesirable.
The PayPal service is known to provide an account linking approach in which PayPal sends two small deposits to a user bank account. The user logs in to the user's online bank account, determines the amounts of the deposits, and reports the amounts to Paypal. In response, PayPal permits the user to link the user's bank account to PayPal. This approach is implemented as a configuration step that the user is required to complete before the user can buy or sell goods or services using the PayPal account.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Arrows in drawings indicate paths for flows of data, and not dependencies of elements.